Cable management is the bane of the PC homebrewing world. Anyone who has assembled a home-built machine has probably struggled with the bundles of cables that are essential to keep the machine running. First, you have to make sure that all the cables can actually be plugged in, which is not always easy depending on your setup. Then you have to hide the evidence (opens in new tab) that this work has been done.

In many cases, this involves stuffing loose cables into hidden pockets on the back of the case, but PC parts manufacturers do not always make this task easy with all the ports on the front of the motherboard. So many people give up on cable management (opens in new tab), and Asus' new motherboard may change this situation by placing the connectors in the back. It is very simple and might work.

This backport revolution was spotted on Asus' new TUF Gaming B760M-BTF WIFI D4 (opens in new tab) by prominent tech Twitter account momo_us (opens in new tab). It turns out that the BTF in this mobo's name stands for "Back To (the) Future" and refers to this new backport design. We may see more motherboards in this style in the future.

That doesn't mean there aren't challenges, especially if this becomes mainstream, as Intel PR's Mark Walton (open in new tab) pointed out in a tweet sharing the Club386 (open in new tab) article: huge power connector on the back, SATA, basically everything else is great to hide, but most cases are not made for that. He also notes that a little DIY work with a Dremel might be a solution to this problem.

A simpler answer would be to make a case to fit this new style of hidden port design; Walton's reply to the tweet includes a rather compelling photo (opens in new tab), but no further verifiable information. In this photo, there is a hole in the back panel through which all the ports can be seen.

Aside from the lack of a case, the Asus TUF Gaming B760M-BTF WIFI D4 appears to be a fairly high-performance small micro-ATX board; like the Asus Rog Strix b760-F Gaming WiFi mobo (opens in new tab), the B760 chip Intel socket supporting 12th and 13th generation processors in the set; PCIe 5.0 on the GPU, PCIe 4.0, DDR4 RAM, and WiFi 6 on the rest.

As for ports, there are quite a few on the rear I/O: HDMI and DisplayPort (open in new tab), three audio jacks, and 2.5Gb Ethernet. there are seven type A USB connections: four USB 2.0 and three USB 3. 2 (including a Gen2 port). This is joined by three Type C, proving that it took until 2023 to even think about connecting a cable to the back of a motherboard.